Today we are excited to announce that Philippe Beaudette has joined us to lead our Community team. He comes from Wikipedia by way of Wikia. At the Wikimedia Foundation (which hosts and supports Wikipedia, among other sites) he was responsible for the team that did community management, user trust and safety, and strategic change management, guiding the community through a time of immense growth and maturation. He spent almost 7 years there, as one of their first community hires, and managed to have his fingers on a huge number of projects, from fundraising (raising money from nearly every country in the world and accepting Wikipedia’s first donation from Antarctica) to community governance and their international elections processes–while dealing with communities working in almost 200 different languages. He’s particularly proud to have led their community interactions around a worldwide 24 hour site shut-down to drive awareness of the SOPA bill two years ago, an effort that Reddit also joined.

After leaving Wikipedia, Philippe joined Wikia and ran the Community Support and Engagement team there, supporting Wikia’s 350,000 fan-created communities. We are honored to have him on our team. Please welcome Philippe!

In addition to Philippe, we have brought on an additional five members to the Community and Trust and Safety teams this week. See if you can collect them all!